Just like spies, the A-team crew, or a crazed-looking professor blathering about time travel, traffic signals also must synchronize their watches.
What happens when they don’t? Well, you get 88th Street in Marysville.
A question from Marysville reader Kelly Gray about traffic light timing on westbound 88th Street led us to this drama in circuitry, with agents of allied traffic agencies at odds unawares…
Gray noted that backups are common on 88th Street from the I-5 overpass to State Street. “The green lights are not allowing for more than seven or eight cars at a time until it turns red again,” he said. “I would think that if the timing of the lights going and coming from Haggen were extended, it would help with the westbound backups.”
City traffic engineer Jesse Hannahs got on the case.
The issue is complicated by the fact that Marysville only controls some of the lights and their timing on that stretch, he noted.
The state Department of Transportation operates the traffic signals at the I-5 on- and off-ramps at the intersection with 34th Avenue NE (Quilceda Boulevard). The city operates those east of I-5 including the signals at 36th Avenue NE and State Avenue.
The WSDOT signals and the Marysville signals don’t (and can’t) talk to each other because of their different software.
To get around that, the city and WSDOT in the past manually coordinated the timing for the heaviest traffic periods on both types of signals.
In order for that to keep working, though, the clocks have to keep doing what clocks should do — keep good time.
And that’s where the plan began to go awry.
“Specifically, it has recently been discovered that the signal controller at 36th Street NE and 88th Street NE has begun to mismanage its time clock and therefore the established signal coordination timing slowly, over a three- to four-month time period, drifts,” Hannahs said. “Due to the close proximity of the 36th Avenue NE and 88th Street NE signal to the I-5 northbound ramp signal, when the time clock drifts, signal coordination issues are likely present.”
The rogue signal’s time clock was reset and coordination restored.
The city also has reached into its bag of tricks and ordered a GPS-based time clock with an antenna to prevent such drift in the future.
The real hero of this story, of course, could be the unsuspecting bystander who finds himself in the middle of a story much larger than anyone imagined…
OK, so maybe I’m invoking a little too much Don LaFontaine on this one. Then again, getting to I-5 in Marysville is a daily drama. Any little bit has got to help. So thanks, Kelly.
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